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Couplets

Travels in Speculative Pragmatism

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Thought in the Act

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Pages: 504

Illustrations: 18 illustrations

Published: October 2021

Author: Brian Massumi

In Couplets, Brian Massumi presents twenty-four essays that represent the full spectrum of his work during the past thirty years. Conceived as a companion volume to Parables for the Virtual, Couplets addresses the key concepts of Parables from different angles and contextualizes them, allowing their stakes to be more fully felt. Rather than organizing the essays chronologically or by topic, Massumi pairs them into couplets to encourage readers to make connections across conventional subject matter categories, to encounter disjunctions, and to link different phases in the evolution of his work. In his analyses of topics ranging from art, affect, and architecture to media theory, political theory, and the philosophy of experience, Massumi charts a field on which a family of conceptual problems plays out in ways that bear on the potentials for acting and perceiving the world. As an essential guide to Massumi's oeuvre, Couplets is both a primer for his new readers and a supplemental resource for those already engaged with his thought.

Praise

“This collection of essays, perhaps more than any other of his groundbreaking books, shows Brian Massumi to be a profoundly political thinker. Its analyses of capitalism are startling, radical, and convincing. And its presentation of domination and violence as the curtailment of a more primary force that is life-enhancing and life-changing will alter the way you think about the political future. Readers will also find elegant accounts of many of Massumi's key concepts, including perception, the virtual, affect, aesthetics (as that which pertains to qualities of experience), sympathy, the outside, dividuality, and the supernormal. A fabulous resource for thinking otherwise.” - Jane Bennett, author of Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman

“Couplets is both an extraordinary speculative and political toolbox for thinking about our time and a magnificent introduction to Brian Massumi's own work, which is undoubtedly among the most original in contemporary thought.” - Didier Debaise, author of Nature as Event: The Lure of the Possible

"Valuable as an experiential introduction to the work of Massumi-Deleuze. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." - R. M. Paddags, Choice

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Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

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Brian Massumi is a Canadian philosopher and social theorist, and, until recently, Professor of Communication at the University of Montreal. He is the author of many books, including Ontopower, The Power at the End of the Economy, and What Animals Teach Us about Politics, all also published by Duke University Press.

Table Of Contents

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Note to the Reader  vii
Couplet 1
2019. Extreme Realism: In Sixteen Series  2
1986. Realer Than Real: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari  15
Couplet 2
2000. On the Right of the Noncommunication of Cultural Difference 26
1998. Event Horizon  63
Couplet 3
2017. Becoming Animal in the Literary Field  72
2008. The Virtual, Double Capture, and the Urban-Architecture Manifold  94
Couplet 4
2009. Simondon's "Technical Mentality" Revisited  104
2012. The Supernormal Animal  119
Couplet 5
1997. Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible  134
2004. Not Determinately Nothing: Building Experience  158
Couplet 6
2014. The Crannies of the Present: On the Subject of Decision  177
2018. Dim, Massive, and Important: Atmosphere in Process  188
Couplet 7
2005. Going Kinetic: What Is Decision in a Post-Deliberative World?  209
2005. Barely There: The Power of the Image at the Limit of Life  232
Couplet 8
1995. Requiem for Our Prospective Dead: A Participatory Critique of Capitalist Power  286
2017. The Political Is Not Personal: Affect, Power, Violence  315
Couplet 9
2001. Tell Me Where Your Pain Is: Pointing to the Body without an Image  324
2015. The Art of the Relational Body: From Mirror-Touch to the Virtual Body  342
Couplet 10
2000. Parable of the Cave (Blind Version)  359
2003. Panoscopia  376
Couplet 11
2003. Urban Appointment: A Possible Rendezvous with the City  376
1999. Purple Phosphene  402
Couplet 12
2007. On Critique  406
2019. How Do You Make Yourself a Proposition? For a Whiteheadian Laboratory (with Erin Manning)  410
Notes  427
References  447
Index  461
Sources  485
Image Credits  489

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Additional Information

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Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-1466-9 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-1373-0 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-2196-4 / DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478021964